Return to Castle Wolfenstein is a good system benchmark, but we're giving the nod to the updated version: Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. This game has made a few revisions to the basic RtCW design, as well as solidifying the features support. The setup is the same as Quake 3, with a 1024x768 resolution, and High quality defaults with in-game detail settings at maximum. We have used a custom demo taken from the Railgun game area, along with plenty of MP participants. This is one tough demo test, so expect the framerates to sink below those of other Quake-based first-person shooters, and give our motherboards a much tougher workload.
The Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory benchmarks don't really stray too far from the subsystem testing, and again show the MSI and ASUS i875P motherboards in front. The entry-level Soyo i865PE and ASUS i848P boards again take up the rear, while the surprising ASUS P4P800 Deluxe once again pushes into mid-range i875P performance areas.
The Comanche 4 benchmark from Novalogic gives us an opportunity to use an actual flight sim for performance testing. Flight sims are notorious for their CPU-dependence, and this makes the Comanche 4 benchmark potentially a better CPU/subsystem test than it is for 3D video cards. The reliance on the CPU shows itself off in the benchmark, and even the slightest difference in framerates could pay off in significantly enhanced game framerates. For our processor comparison, all testing has been performed at 1024x768, 32-bit with audio disabled.
Comanche 4 really shows off the inherent power of each Intel platform, and the performance results split exactly along chipset lines. The powerful i875P boards are all at the top of the list, while the i865PE and i848P take the bottom. Even the MAM-equipped ASUS P4P800 Deluxe can't duplicate its ranking with Comanche 4, though it still provides noticeably higher performance than the standard Soyo i865PE Dragon 2.
Unreal Tournament 2003 includes a benchmark program that automatically tests in two separate modes. One is Flyby, which takes a canned tour of the UT game world and then offers up a framerate score and really hammers both the CPU and video card. There is also a Botmatch score, but since it we are keeping the video and CPU hardware totally consistent, this test is mostly superfluous for motherboard benchmarking. In this section, we've tested UT 2003 Flyby at 1024x768 x 32-bit.
We're back to the same basic trend with Unreal Tournament 2003, and once again the ASUS P4P800 Deluxe and MSI 875P NEO-FIS2R are out to a comfortable lead. We also see the ASUS i865PE moving up the charts again, and this is the first time the ASUS P4P800S-E Deluxe has moved out of the basement.
